How To Use Advanced Search Options on Google

Google is quite powerful and amazingly accurate when it comes to helping people find things. However, not many people know that Google can be used in different ways to drill down even deeper towards finding information. These are called Advanced Search Operators.

You might not realize this but, performing a simple search for a keyword phrase or topic is an example of a Basic Search Operator. The part that may impress you is that even the basic search operators do quite advanced things. The advanced search operators, well using them can produce even more impressive results.

All in all, it’s quite important to learn the operators and commands. Doing so will allow you to find more accurate information. But there’s a bonus. If you’re learning about SEO, understanding many of the Basic and Advanced search operators can help you learn quite a bit about search engine optimization.

Let’s take a look at a few of them and see how they work, and also let’s see how they can tie into your SEO.

The Site Specific Search

The site specific search allows users to search for results from only one site. For SEO, knowing how to do this can come in handy because you can easily find pages on a friend’s site that contain relevant keywords that you may want linking back to your site. Having links that point back to your site or a page within your site can increase the chances of improving your ranking and visibility.

example keyword phrase site:examplesite.com

The above will return pages on examplesite.com that contain the [example keyword phrase].

Another way to make excellent use of the site specific search operator is to filter results by domain name. For example, many people believe that receiving backlinks from .GOV domain names is the best quality. One way of finding relevant pages to try to get your link added within a .GOV domain would be to search for only .GOV results.

example keyword phrase site:.gov

The above will return pages on all .GOV domains in the index with the [example keyword phrase]. From there you can contain site authors, webmasters, and blog owners and try to get your link added. You’d be amazed to discover that sending hand written emails is quite an effective way towards landing very handcrafted and high quality backlinks.

The “All In” Search Operators

The allin search operators are fun. It reminds me of when I flip through the TV channels late at night and I catch a glimpse of the high stakes poker channel, when the players say, “All In!” and the audience gets excited.

The allin search operator gets me excited too because this command is one of the more useful commands for SEO. Let me explain them and show you how knowing how to use them, and most importantly, show you how to review the results produced. The allin operators are as follows:

allinanchor:, allintext:, allintitle:, allinurl:

I use these operators when I am doing keyword research. When I do keyword research, I use programs such as Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Google Wonder Wheel, and a few other paid programs to find keywords that have the potential to turn a profit for me by attaining a superior organic ranking. The process can be split into two parts.

The first is determining if certain keywords yield a high amount of potential profit and traffic. The second part is determining if I can rank organically for the keyword phrases. Using the allin search operators is one of the tools I use to determine part two. In my next article I am going to give you some excellent examples of how to use the allin search operators and how it ties into SEO. Also, we’ll continue with more lessons on organic search engine ranking so be sure to stay tuned.

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